Primary Data, creator of the world's first enterprise metadata engine, today announced that it has raised a total of $40 million USD in its second round of funding to support continued sales growth in tandem with the 2.0 release of its DataSphere software platform for intelligent and automated data management at petabyte scale. The funding includes a $20 million investment with participation from Pelion Venture Partners, Accel, Battery Ventures, and strategic investors from prior rounds, as well as a $20 million line of credit to support sales acceleration amidst the new product release and new industry partnerships.

"The days of manual data management are coming to an end, and this investment round indicates the growth our investors also see on the horizon," said Lance Smith, Primary Data Chief Executive Officer. "Our second raise is strategically aligned to our plans for building out our sales team and our business. As data volumes scale out and up into the cloud, enterprises are looking for a way to intelligently manage and automate how data is managed across different storage systems. DataSphere 2.0 brings machine learning to data management, enabling our customers to set policies that ensure they have the right data in the right place at the right time, automatically and without application disruption."

To bring machine learning into data management, DataSphere collects metadata of a client's data access and how it experiences the IOPS, latency, bandwidth and availability provided by storage. Intelligent analytics are then applied against the metadata, enabling DataSphere to match business requirements for performance, cost and reliability, make real-time automated decisions, move data without application disruption to overcome or prevent outages, and maintain compliance of service level agreements or objectives. The ability to automatically manage data by objectives enables enterprises to maximize the value of existing infrastructure and easily integrate with the cloud to achieve unprecedented improvements in performance, efficiency and scalability. DataSphere's global namespace makes different storage systems simultaneously available to applications, operating out of band and without application interruption. This delivers unprecedented control and integration across flash, NAS and cloud storage systems.

"Automating data management through an intelligent data fabric that spans different types of storage is critical to enabling enterprises to fully leverage their data while finally solving storage complexity," said Blake Modersitzki, Managing Director at Pelion Venture Partners. "With DataSphere, Primary Data is leading the industry in bringing intelligence to data management across the enterprise and into the cloud, and we are proud to invest in the transformation Primary Data is delivering for its innovative customers."

Emphasizing the importance of DataSphere's vendor-agnostic data management capabilities, in the March 2017 report, "How to Use SDS for Storage Management in Petabyte-scale Environments," Gartner Analyst Santhosh Rao advised, "Software-defined storage (SDS) products from storage vendors that are positioned for storage management and automation often provide limited to no integration with other storage vendor portfolios. I&O leaders evaluating SDS tools for storage management as part of their infrastructure modernization strategy must choose products that can perform multivendor storage management."

Across cloud integration, automated data migrations, scaling out NAS performance and ensuring virtualization QoS, DataSphere 2.0 brings intelligence into data management through new customer-requested features and powerful management capabilities, such as Objective Expressions and other highlights:

Control Your Data's Destiny with Objective Expressions: DataSphere 2.0 enables IT to quickly choose from a catalog of data objectives, and now provides deep control capabilities with Objective Expressions, developed by Primary Data co-founder and CTO David Flynn. Data mobility and allocation can be set according to built-in file system, user-extended and programmable attributes.

Get the Right Data to the Cloud: Easily move data at the file-level to both private and public clouds, with the ability to automatically retrieve it back to performance storage if needed again. Parallel performance and support for multiple clouds delivers agility and flexibility to scale cloud adoption in tandem with business objectives. Snapshot enhancements deliver the ability to move or copy data to the cloud to protect data without impacting enterprise capacity.

Keep Your Windows Open from NFS to SMB: DataSphere 2.0 adds support for SMB 2.1 and 3.1, as well as Active Directory. DataSphere also supports shares used by both Windows and NFS (Linux) clients to ensure that security and file permissions are handled correctly across both NFS and SMB.

Connect and Recover Without Interruption: DataSphere 2.0 provides metadata assimilation of NFS storage without interrupting data access, so that data can be seamlessly into the DataSphere global namespace without the need to copy data. Virtual networks, VLAN support and support for IPv6 and IPv4 environments meets enterprise customer requirements for supporting large network environments. Snapshot enhancements deliver the ability to move or copy data to the cloud to protect data without impacting enterprise capacity.

See What You've Been Missing: A number of new features enable IT to see and control data across their entire storage ecosystem. An updated user interface provides a new look and feel, new objectives can be created based on existing ones, and objects links throughout the UI facilitate navigation. In addition, Cloud Mover statistics provide insight on data activity in the cloud and a new dashboard provides metadata details about application and stores.

"When technology is complex, it often means we need to figure out a better solution to the problem," said Steve Wozniak, Primary Data Chief Scientist.

"DataSphere 2.0 makes it simple for enterprises to finally automate how data is managed by using the intelligence that has been sitting right there in your metadata all along."

As DataSphere 2.0 comes to market, Primary Data continues to expand its market reach through partnerships with Amazon Web Services, Cloudian, Google, Scality, NetApp, and VMware to help joint customers get the right data to the right place at the right time. DataSphere 2.0 is now available from Primary Data and its reseller partners in a number of deployment options. DataSphere can be distributed across the enterprise, or to support smaller Lines of Business workloads. To learn more, contact DeepDive@primarydata.com.

About Primary Data
Primary Data develops intelligence and automation software for enterprise data management across on-premises IT infrastructure and into the cloud. Its DataSphere platform combines metadata management and machine learning to move the right data to the right place at the right time across a global namespace, automatically and without application disruption. DataSphere makes heterogeneous data stores simultaneously available to all applications, enabling enterprises operating at petabyte scale to easily manage billions of files, automate data migration, integrate the cloud, and scale out NAS performance while getting the most value out of infrastructure investments on a per-client, per-file basis. To learn more, visit us at PrimaryData.com, follow us on Facebook.com/PdDataSphere, or Twitter at @Primary_Data.